Rather than waste a day not detecting, we decided to have a couple of hours at a local cricket pitch as a compromise. This was due to one of the team having a heavy session the night before. The pitch itself is placed over a field of ridge and furrow so, before starting, we joked about the "ubiquitous" hammered.

Even before switching on, we found a £2 coin on the surface!There had been a bonfire there two nights previously so our "job" was to clean up any sparklers lying on the surface. The groundsman was pleased that we could provide such a service for free.He didn't know how long the field had been a cricket pitch so perhaps we could pin it down to a rough period?

We used the 9" HF coils for a change governed by the usual standard GMP which has proved itself time and time again.Sure enough, decimal and pre-decimal coinage started to emerge with 46% of the coinage being the latter, so almost a 50/50 split.125 coins in total were recovered with some coming from depths of 10 inches.

Some lovely examples of silver coinage were recovered, one being a nice hammered sixpence of Elizabeth I dated 1585 (8 inches deep), the rest were made up of Victorian, George V and George VI. A superb florin of George VI date 1946 came up in the same condition as when it was dropped. The George V shilling and sixpence as well as the George VI sixpence were also in great condition.

​As for the "cut-half", would you believe we found the other half too!